RAYGUN GOTHIC GMB.Chomichuk
presents
1.
Time was strange for me. I looked at the stone and listened to the bird’s call and breathed deeply under my mask to take in the heavy air of the seaside morning. It could have been five thousand years before. There might have been a ship made of timber and pulled by rope-harnessed wind just about to crest the horizon. The pace of the world does not change, only the things in it become different.
Very different indeed. The vessel that did arrive harnessed the atom rather than the wind. Its crew sailed very different seas. Yet a warship was a warship in any era. The arrival of The Cassius bespoke of a world I had long since stepped out of. One may leave the dance floor. The music will play on. Humanity itself existed like a proxy state in the celestial conflict of two great stellar nations. Humanity was the shore, while the land and the sea made war as a tide.
The Regent had experience to prop confidence on her shoulders and the weight of ambition to hold it there. Her uniform told me one story. Her scars told me another. The great golems on each side of her told me how much I was no longer in favor of the Parliament.
Favor is like the weather. Sometimes a storm is welcome, sometimes it is not. I still bore my crown. It lingered there above me and reminded her that regardless of her authority in the territories, I was still a King. She reminded me of a King’s responsibilities. She dared remind me of my Oath.
I warned her.
My daughter was quite like me in that regard. I was proud of her for that.
She insisted.
RAYGUN GOTHIC GMB.Chomichuk
presents
2.
Ships of the Ninth Fleet closed on the city of Illium and found that she was ready. The flotilla moved like tiny schools of fish around a bloated mother.
Inside the orbital city I was to rescue a woman the Parliment considered paramount to their war effort. She had come in peace to offer an alliance. Illium had already swtiched sides. I assured them I was not the man for it. The Parliment had insisted.
My daugther had insisted.
Long ago I weighed the meanings and the reasons and the righteousness of conflict. In a short life such things matter greatly. In a short life such things are paramount to crafting a impetus for one’s actions and a reason to take the risk. In a long life it is much different. Now I care little for the politics of knives and instead follow a single simple value.
My Oath.
Arimestes was with me. The Automatic has been a dear friend through the ages. Arimestes understood how it felt to stand outside of human time. Like me, he would not age. He may wear down, he may be killed, but he would not die. “The 9th is waiting for the command,” Arimestes said. “Send them,” I said. The hoplites were well-suited to this, they had trained since nine-years-old to move about without gravity. They were anxious to engage in battle. Their paradigm had been one of servittude, honor and grace. Careful social development crafted a group willing to care passionately for a cause but not feel grief at the loss of a comrade. Humans are social animals and as such, easy to manipulate. There was a time that people believed robots would make the best soldiers. History has proven that to be incorrect. Robots are expensive to produce and repair, robots find it difficult to adapt beyond their enviroment. Intelligent machines can easily calculate the waste of conflict. People, by contrast, are cheap to produce and easy to program. Social engineering and population managment can establish a nearly limitless weath of warriors with almost no oversight required. Arimestes was an Automatic: a robot with self-awareness. His intellect and unlimited knowledge, as well as his immortality and perspective, made him worth a million men and women on the battlefield.
My hoplites swam across void. The Gravity Well of Illium pulled them slowly toward an arbitrary “down�.
Within my sensorium I could hear the warriors laughing.
A young man, Fellion by name, exploded and dissipated in a flash of superheated plasma.
The hoplites cheered. Only one thing gave them more pleasure then dropping through a gravity field into battle.
To be joined by their King.
I entered the fray astride my warwing. A genetically engineered beast of my own design, its ferrous skeleton rode a magnetic current as sure as any creature ever took to the air. The Drones came. Nothing about me made sense to their remote pilots. Nothing about me fit their paradigm of conventional war. I sliced through their ballistic-ceramic shells and swatted aside their raybeams. I pressed deeper into the gravity field and took ancient war and magic with me. Somewhere in the Illium Cortex a cadre of drone pilots rolled and flailed, biofeedback through their sensoriums ripped their nervous systems to shreds. Their commanders scream at the technicians: How impossible this is, how the purpose of the drone is to save lives. I am impossible. To face me in combat is to risk death. Not a boast, magic.
The warwing boiled inside then erupted in a splash of fire that blossomed and swelled in the low gravity. Below me on the surface of Illium the fighting was thick and mechanized. My landed hoplites where overmatched and overexposed to the heat-rays and microwaves of the Illium remote defenders. Crashed starcraft goudged the surface and pockets of the invaders fought to gain entry below the industrial strata of Illium’s surface. The defenders resisted with verve and the hoplites died a hundred at a time. A terrible waste of warriors and ships, if one saw time only in the moment. Perspective told me otherwise.
The hoplites were the feint. I was the weapon that would win this war. I was not here to lead their charge, they were my delivery system.
Thousands of years of experimentation and improvisation and innovation have not yeilded the peaceful resolution of conflict that the philosophers had prediced. The human drive to feel the exhileration and the social status that conflict gave had never been rooted out. Perhaps that is why the citystates of Sol were so easily drawn into this conflict. War is natural to us. As social animals we allow rank and status to direct us easily. We allow conformity to shape our drives. We value those with self-actualization but do not seek it in ourselves if we find a cause to follow.
Illium remains a drone state. Long ago they gave up the weakness of flesh and its terrestrial bonds and built a stratafied society protected from outside. The Illium Wall it is called. A robotic skin on their interaction with other city-states. None have seen a citizen of Illium in centuries. A hemetically sealed society. Illium technology cannot protect them from me. Arimnestes proposes a theory that my biogenic field interacts psionically with any whose attention is directed at me. His theory is that my altered aura has a autonomic defensive system that telepathically locates and attacks those who seek to harm me. To me Arimnestes’ theory is no more correct or likely as the original charm told to me by the Crossroad Witches of Dunsinane. Magic.
Those that would do you harm must risk the same.
The shattered fragments of machine proxies seemingly without end were meant to break the hope of a human attacker. The illusion is that these defenders are tireless, that there is no way to harm those you seek. The Illium Wall had a weakness. The Remote Pilots were human. I began to see their patterns. I began to see their training. I could see in the tapestry of their violence the entire shape of their philosophy. I could read in that philosophy the form of their paradigm behind the Wall. They were accustomed to superiority.
My attacks were reaching beyond their defenses for the first time. They had casualties, soldiers killed in action. Men and women would be screaming in pain and agony then falling from their sensoriums never to move again. I could feel hesitation in the entire force. I needed chaos more than death. I shifted my assault. I split limbs and joints, I pierced bodies but left them wounded. There beyond the Wall I imagined the people writhing in new agony. I imagined the horror of sudden pain, of bones splitting and blood pulsing across consoles. The horror of war suddenly thrust into the sterile womb of remote technology. The ripple effect was immediate. I could see another weakness in the Wall. Each operator was clearly a puppeteer with hold of hundreds of strings. The remote operators were a fraction of the population of the drones.
Suddenly my hoplites surged forward closing in on flanks and breaking cover to bring the fight in close. I rode the momentum as openings in the remote defenders opened like gates in the Wall. Once more unto the breach.
I was over the brink and descending.
A free fall through the rays and calls of two opposing armies down the cityshaft into the living levels of Illium.
I was prepared for the battalion of proxy men and women that awaited me in the promenades of Illium. I was ready to meet them with steel and blood and magic. “Peace,” said a robotic figure that marched forward through the mist of a hundred coolant systems. At once I could tell he was not a proxy. Not a robot puppet. He was a man. A cyborg chassis with a human brain. Perhaps more of a man than I am. “Peace,” he said again. “You are Sir Walter the Grim. The Anomaly Man of Tsar. I am Adrestus, a Champion of Illium. I come not for threats or violence. I come to you with flesh inside to offer terms. You come to rescue a women for the Parliament.“ “She is not our captive Sir Walter, we are hers.” He told me the women had come under the flag of peace, deceived his masters and taken hostage the population of Illium.
The pace of the world does not change, only the things in it become different. I cared nothing for such politics. My Oath drove me onward. “Stop fighting and I will take her away,” I said. “If we stop fighting we die,” Adrestus said. “Lady Astrel and her lover have the flesh of Illium in their control.” “Only a few of us with flesh inside are able to rebel. Yet we have nothing to tip the balance in our favor.”
“You do,” I said.
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